In SF’s most expensive election, money talks. Are voters listening?

Turn off the press: tomorrow is election day. Who you vote for matters. It will affect your life and your children’s life in the short and long term. The winner will control a vast nuclear arsenal.

We are talking about the mayor’s race, of course. Is the San Francisco mayoral race most important to you? If yes: What’s wrong with you? (Okay, the mayor can’t deploy weapons of mass destruction. Except for one date. Sorry, Livermore.)

About 71 percent of San Franciscans voted in 2022 for Supervisor Dean Preston’s Proposition H, which pushed the 2023 mayoral election to this year. The reason was simple: In the three previous municipal elections in odd-numbered years, voter turnout was 42 percent, 45 percent, and 29 percent, respectively. And in the previous three previous municipal elections, which coincided with presidential and/or gubernatorial contests, turnout was 86%, 74% and 81%.

It’s very hard to argue that our most important elections shouldn’t be timed to maximize voter turnout (as Prop. H opponents discovered). You may recall that Mayor London Breed in 2022 stated Prop. H was a “power grab” orchestrated by the far left of the city. This was a statement that was ridiculous in the moment and continued to become more ridiculous with each passing moment and with each million dollar donation in the most expensive mayoral race ever.

The idea that allowing many more people to vote in a free and fair election was somehow a “power grab” – not to mention one that benefited a group of people on the far left – is the kind of claim you’d expect to see espoused on conspiracy podcasts. sponsored by Miracle Diet Supplements. It’s never been a mystery who the real beneficiaries of moving mayoral elections to presidential years will be. We wrote who will be in 2022. We he did it again in January 2024. It is not the extreme left.

On the contrary, they are rich candidates. Or candidates with access to wealth. There are a number of reasons for this, but the first is the most obvious: math.

Simple math. It currently exists approximately 521,000 registered voters in San Francisco. In past mayoral races, about 40 to 50 percent of them would head to the polls. this year, at least 80% of voters will show up. There is a delta here of maybe 200,000 voters or more. You need to reach these low information voters – which they are most hard-to-reach voters.

That costs money.

The political posts you could use to wallpaper three or four rooms in your house? Postage for those is 38 cents each. If it costs campaigns 80 cents on the dollar to design, print and send those emails — and they have to send up to 200,000 more in each batch to reach voters — those costs add up. It might be more expensive than mailing the wallpapers, come to think of it.