Election Day 2024: Live results and analysis

Portland isn’t the only city where homelessness will be a key issue in the mayoral race. A contest focused on crime and homelessness is also looming in San Francisco, potentially changing local dynamics in the city. Like the Portland mayoral election, the race will be conducted using ranked-choice voting. And for the first time this year, San Francisco’s mayoral election will coincide with the presidential election after voters passed a referendum in 2022 to push back the date of the mayoral election – a change that gave current Mayor London Breed an extra year in office.

Unfortunately for Breed, that extra year doesn’t seem to have helped her reputation around town. According to an Emerson College/KRON-TV poll in early September, only 27% of San Francisco voters approved of Breed’s job as mayor while 51% disapproved, numbers consistent with other polls in the city.

Breed first became acting mayor in 2017 following the death of Mayor Ed Lee and was elected to a full term in 2019. She initially took a more progressive stance on issues such as police funding and homelessness, but has since taken a reverse course. In recent years, Breed has increased funding for law enforcement, and in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest or fine people sleeping on the streets, she encouraged officials to bring homeless people to justice and offering them free to buy bus tickets outside the city instead of accommodating them.

And while overall crime in the city itself is down significantly from pre-pandemic levels, Breed is also struggling to deal with a looming budget deficit and a significant number of overdose deaths in the city.

As a result, the incumbent faces stiff competition today with a total of 11 candidates on the ballot. According to her main rivals, Daniel Lurie is a political outsider, heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and founder of a local nonprofit that has worked on many of the race’s key issues – homelessness, crime justice and poverty – a biography he used in the campaign has. Board President Aaron Peskin is just behind them, but not far enough to be out of the running.

Sextant Strategies’ latest poll for the San Francisco Chronicle shows Breed won the largest share of votes in the first round but lost to Lurie by 12 points in the final round of ranked-choice voting. Other polls released by the Peskin and Lurie campaigns showed a similar picture: Breed performed well in the first round of voting but trailed when voters’ second and third choices were combined.