San Francisco voters backed Mayor Daniel Lurie's efforts to clean up City Hall, and once again affirmed their support for Sunset Dunes Park and the ongoing closure of the Great Highway in Tuesday's election.
Ballots are still being counted, but we have some preliminary results in local SF races and ballot measures. These results are based on the approximately 185,000 ballots tallied so far, a turnout of 34.6% — and a good number of ballots are likely still out there. For comparison, the final turnout number in SF for the June primary was 51%, and turnout in the 2022 midterms was 62%.
San Franciscans went for all the incumbents in the state races, and 82% voted for Xavier Becerra for governor. Former SF supervisor Jane Kim has 51.7% of the local vote for insurance commissioner, and her statewide lead over Ben Allen is similarly slim.
Matt Haney and Catherine Stefani also handily won their re-elections to the State House, both with well over 80% of the vote.
And state Senator Scott Wiener currently has a 17,000 vote lead over Connie Chan to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress — a lead of 55.4% over Chan's 44.6%.
Incumbent Supervisors Matt Dorsey and Stephen Sherrill both have leads in the ranked-choice counts for their districts, as does Sunset District Supervisor Alan Wong — who is currently at 75.7% after a second-round tally.
In District 8, Gary McCoy is leading Darshini Patel 64.6% to 35.4%. Manny Yekutiel, who dropped out of the race a month ago amid multiple sexual groping allegations, still garnered around 3,000 votes, but was eliminated in the second round of ranked-choice tallying.
In District 10, Theo Ellington is leading by over 30 points, at 66.9%, over DJ Brookter's 33.1% in a second-round tally.
San Franciscans voted for all the statewide bond measures, and rejected Prop 39 by a wide margin, 79% to 21%, which would have required voters to present ID on Election Day.
And while the so-called Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, is failing statewide, San Francisco voters are so far 52.4% in the "Yes" camp.
The Lurie-backed measures A, D, E, and F all appear to be passing, giving the mayor a significant win in his efforts to consolidate power and reform City Hall.
Measure A, which eliminates or reorganizes some commissions and advisory bodies, currently has 70.6% of the vote, and voters largely seem to be signing off on the other three measures as well, which will raise the bar for getting future measures on the ballot, change city contracting procedures, and expand the mayor's power to transfer powers between department heads and hire deputy mayors.
Predictably, given that we just voted on this two years ago, Prop G, the "reopen the Great Highway" measure, is failing by a significant margin. Almost 63% of the vote so far is "No," with 37% voting "Yes." Of the around 174,000 ballots counted so far for G, 109,000 are "No" votes, compared to 65,000 "Yes" votes.
And, happily for all those who rely on public transit, both Prop H, the parcel tax to fund Muni operations, and the regional measure RTM to support all transit, look to be passing by healthy margins.
