Millions of dollars flooded San Francisco’s November election — with most of that money aimed at pushing deceitful narratives pedestaled by moderates.
San Francisco’s 2024 local election is (mostly) over. All of the City’s 514 precincts have reported their in-person ballots. Additional mail-in ballots might be included in the San Francisco Department of Election’s December 3rd report — likely the final results report from the department for the 2024 general election cycle, due to deadlines established by California law — but 78.9% of San Francisco’s registered voting population have had their voices counted, tallied, and ranked.
San Francisco’s total registered voter count for the 2024 general election is 522,265 individuals, and the City’s elections department has counted 412,090 cast ballots — 67% of which were mailed in. For a city of around 808,000 residents, the former statistic is an anomaly inside a country rife with voter apathy. Current data from the United States Census Bureau suggests the 18-year-old and older population in San Francisco is about 694,000 … meaning 75% of SF’s age-eligible voting population is registered to vote — well above the national average.
Three weeks have now passed since Election Day. San Francisco’s 2024 general election autopsy can now be conducted. And one of the most liberal cities in the country isn’t immune to political pathologies plaguing America, many of which have sickened democracies across the world.
The most glaring malignancy revealed atop this proverbial operating table is just how the infectious rise of moderatism is in local politics.
Political conservatism has increased across the United States, even here in San Francisco, reflecting the national red shift of rural and urban municipalities; the percentage of registered democrats in San Francisco hit a 20-year low in 2024.
Make no mistake: We have voted a regime aligned with fascist values into the White House, but whether or not it will succeed remains unclear. Trump’s wildly comical cabinet picks suggest incompetence in the executive branch could be our saving grace again. No matter how it all pans out, there’s no denying that present-day moderatism got us here in the first place.
Moderatism has a pendulous history in American politics. Through the late 1960s and 1970s, the “middle of the road” movement gained prestige among Republicans, particularly young Republicans who wanted to separate themselves from the horrors during the Vietnam War conducted under President Nixon and those aligning themselves with the Civil Rights Movement, while remaining loyal to the party.
The ensuing decades saw America’s duopoly typically consist of self-described moderates in times of both Republican-majority and Democratic-majority government; moderatism effectively peaked in the early 2000s with some 38% of the voting population describing themselves with “moderate values.” It was during this time the stereotype of moderates as being “liberals in disguise” was popularized — a barometer of the liberal tilt the country experienced starting in the 1990s.
Moderatism is indeed a weatherglass of greater political shifts. Its leanings are predicated on the weight certain societal notions carry with them at any one time. Moderatism has no true north or south, unlike the Republican and Democratic parties; it’s equatorial, and its organized cohort shifts toward poles of power over implicit doctrines.
By 2011, moderatism began its conservative transition following the Great Recession and years of unfavorable opinions with federal governments under a Democratic majority. 2016 saw the moderate vote synonymous with the “silent Trump voter.” Despite the 2020 general election being largely considered a mandate against Trumpism, the scarcity politics it was founded on continued to spread throughout the Republican party.
Moderatism soon evolved into a counterbalance against liberalism and progressivism, holstering the growing power of disdain held by conservative groups. This decades-in-the-making wave of new-age moderatism now crashes on a novel, ironic stereotype: moderates considered “conservatives in disguise” in 2024.
This is why the moderate microcosm in San Francisco is arguably the most polarizing of any large American city. Why? The blinding contrast.
San Francisco’s history in liberal politics has existed as sliding glass doors into generational change that would later define the country. The City was the first to elect an openly gay person to an elected local government position; become synonymous with women occupying high-ranking government jobs in otherwise male-dominated positions; denounce majority-organized positions and establish inclusive movements; safeguarded and uplift and empower the transgender communities, all while seeing their ascent to history-making positions in local and state government. The list goes on.
Moderatism doesn’t negate, belittle, or bemoan such monumental changes. They usually celebrate them. But unlike the liberal machines that propelled them into existence, moderatism operates on deliberately traditional gearings, slowed down by hesitancy and a fetishism around nostalgia — sentimentality that betters their factions.
The previous four years leading up to the 2024 general election in San Francisco were marked by conditions rife for a moderate boom.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s popularity rode up and down a rollercoaster; housing costs continued to grow with more red-tape wrapping new construction; pushback against the spending and execution powers of local government agencies staffed by incumbent liberals ballooning. A global pandemic spurred a “mass exodus” of San Franciscans — an emigration motion that offered the perfect proxy for anti-establishment rhetoric and a call for radical change in City Hall— who became displeased with decreasing quality of life. As the city recovered and promised a fresh, bright chapter, historically unseen amounts of capital from conservative-leaning PACs, many of which existed outside of San Francisco, and prominent Bay Area tech moguls were directed at influencing San Francisco’s renaissance.
It was enough cash to oust former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. It was also enough to fund the explosive growth of a new San Francisco media outlet. The San Francisco Standard is financed by venture capitalist and philanthropist Michael Moritz; Moritz has spent millions of dollars over nearly a decade to influence San Francisco politics and push ballot measures aligned with moderatism. Moritz’s politized op-eds in the New York Times have raised ethical concerns, particularly around the journalistic integrity of the news outlet he owns and funds.
Moritz’s spending on conservative-leaning agendas underscores the lifeblood needed to keep moderatism alive — fiscal funding. Because moderatism is a facade of political ambiguity, it lacks the grassroots actions and coalition-building Republicans and Democrats can rely on to push influence; it’s ideologically impossible and impractical to build groups of leverage in a vacuum of foundational beliefs. In the absence of consequential human power, money is the funnel of which moderatism needs to echo its messaging.
Groups like GrowSF, the moderate PAC now behind The Bold Italic, and TogetherSF, which Moritz also backs, have collectively poured tens of millions into local races. Mission Local has conducted phenomenal journalism cataloging, documenting, and organizing the estimated $72 million that influenced SF’s November elections. The overwhelming majority of this money came from self-described moderate single donors and PACs associated with outright conservatism, conservative-leaning agendas, or organizations described as supporting moderate movements and candidates. The results of all that spending proved somewhat fruitful, but by no means was a runaway success.
District 3 candidate Danny Sauter, who did not support Proposition 33 — a ballot item that aimed to expand rent-control measures across California to safeguard renters from egregious rent hikes and protect them from certain inhuman eviction practices — and had a local labor union pull its endorsement for him, won his race. District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, who served as GrowSF’s scapegoat for years, was booted from his seat by software company founder and documented gaslighter Bilal Mahmood; Mahmood’s initial campaign described him as a “neurologist from Stanford,” though it was later discovered Mahood’s primary undergraduate research experience was a “brief part-time internship that involved ‘scarless wound-healing,’ not on the nervous system,” and, thus, had no training or experience working with the human nervous system — the claim was later removed from all his campaign messaging without followup as to why.
Of the six San Francisco Board of Supervisor races moderate groups aimed to influence this election cycle, Sauter and Mahmood are the only two successes. TogetherSF-backed Farrell failed spectacularly.
While all the millions of dollars spent by moderate donors and PACs didn’t equate to unilateral wins, every cent supported the primary weapon wielded by moderates: emotionally persuasive language.
Campaigns run by a self-described moderate in the 2024 San Francisco general election used intentionally deceitful phrasing. The buzzy verbiage that rang throughout flyers, texts, emails, and voting guides by moderate groups (and the candidates they supported) included expressions like “common sense law,” “normal governing practices,” and hollow promises to “get back on track.”
These wordings seem benign; they sit inside a canon of perceived innocence. But they’re far from it; they’re insidious and deliberately persuasive without logical articulations.
Moderatism relies on carefully bending reality toward a perceived center, but not too far in either direction to snap the proverbial needle. To accomplish this, moderatism phraseology relies on convincing a voting population of inflated absurdities — exaggerating nonsenses on the opposing tilt. In San Francisco, the conservative-leaning moderatism in American politics means the group’s gauzy language berates liberalism.
The word “pragmatism” was weaponized ad nauseam by moderate San Francisco candidates this election year to favorably describe their agendas. By using the word, it’s implied that realism is absent in our shared reality. Because there’s no perceived semblance of actuality, policies in the moderate playbooks can be modeled as absolutes.
Moreover: Their adoptions could exist without criticism — because any objection would be founded outside understood truths. Warping language is a slippery slope to conspiracy-making and authoritarianism … which is what the Republican majority has already embraced.
We’re less than two months away from the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States. His presidential cabinet picks will test the congressional strength of our executive branch, bending it in ways yet seen. Mr. Trump will likely have an opportunity to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court — cementing a conservative-majority bench that could underwrite the Constitution as we know it. If we’re to believe his words as truth, Mr. Trump will wield his executive powers in ways aligned with “strong boys” who sit atop failed democracies.
The world we’re about to be thrust into requires an unflinching backbone to the morals, values, and ethics we hold immutable. For our democracy. For ourselves. For the society we yearn to exist in. Moderatism’s flimsy qualities have no room in our fragile world — no matter the price tag they may carry.
Feature Image: Screenshot of Chris Arvin’s Election Map SF turnout model.
