(Bloomberg) -- Even San Francisco, a liberal bastion and conservative punching bag, has found itself caught up in the nation’s rightward shift.
More than 15% of the city’s voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump in last week’s election, compared with 9.3% when he first ran in 2016, according to data from the California Secretary of State. It was the highest share for a Republican presidential candidate in San Francisco in 20 years.
While the results reflect a national trend, they take on a particular resonance in San Francisco, where only 7% of voters are registered Republicans and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, once served as district attorney. Now, local GOP boosters hope they can seize the momentum and reengage a wealthy donor class that had otherwise given up on the city.
“Currently there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that Republicans can’t succeed in the city, so why bother supporting them?” said Jay Donde, co-founder of the San Francisco Briones Society, a Republican group pushing for a more moderate city. “This shows there’s an opportunity for Republican candidates who can have success.”
San Francisco remains a strong liberal foothold and has no chance of turning red anytime soon. But as the city struggles with an intractable homelessness crisis, street crime and record office vacancies, the election results reflected a sentiment echoed across the country: unhappiness with the status quo. Despite having no political experience, Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit executive Daniel Lurie unseated incumbent Mayor London Breed after running as a moderate Democrat. He has said his plan on day one is to declare a state of emergency over the city’s fentanyl epidemic.
San Francisco isn’t alone. Across deep-blue California, voters signaled a shift in sentiment. A state ballot measure that increased penalties for repeated theft and certain drug crimes passed with nearly 70% of the vote. Los Angeles’ progressive district attorney, George Gascón, lost his reelection bid. In Oakland, voters recalled Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County district attorney Pamela Price after property and violent crime rates spiked in the last year.
Nearly 40% of Californians voted for Trump, as Harris recorded the lowest percentage for a Democrat in two decades. The state’s swing could have implications for the governor’s race in 2026, where already some high-profile Republicans are considering making a run as Democrat Gavin Newsom terms out.
“Liberals getting mugged is making them more conservative. This is a human phenomenon,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a leading Republican lawyer in San Francisco who worked closely with the Trump campaign. “I think people are fed up. The taxpayers are fed up, and you have seen a more moderate movement here.”
Shifting Tenor
The tenor toward Republicans has changed since 2016, when protesters were locking themselves to the doors of tech companies in San Francisco for working with the Trump administration. Instead, this election season Trump made several pit stops in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he was greeted with flag-waving supporters.
Several San Francisco tech leaders and residents, like Craft Ventures’ David Sacks, backed Trump’s reelection openly and loudly. In June, he held a fundraiser for the candidate at his Pacific Heights home, which raised over $12 million for the campaign. Sacks, who has close ties to Trump backer Elon Musk, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Whether Trump’s loudest supporters in tech will turn their support to local politics remains to be seen, but Donde said he believes there’s an opening for this to be the floor, not the ceiling to local Republican support. Already more moderate tech Democrats have been spending hundreds of millions to shape the city and push its politics toward the center.
“It helps nudge the thinking of the donor class, of the activist class, of folks that generally do care about seeing San Francisco return to better days,” Donde said.
In line with national trends, San Francisco saw a swing in the Latino vote toward Trump, who gathered more than 30% of the votes in neighborhoods such as Outer Mission and Visitacion Valley that have a large Hispanic population, according to an analysis by Election Map SF. In the city’s heavily Asian western neighborhoods, Trump brought in 25% of the vote. He failed to make headway in LGBTQ neighborhoods like the Castro, which recorded low single-digit support for the Republican nominee.
Outside of the presidential race, other down-ballot races in San Francisco saw Republican candidates drawing roughly 20% in the vote, including the Republican challenger Bruce Lou, who took 18.7% of the votes against former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It’s a sign to Donde that it’s a matter of placing the right candidate in the right race in the right neighborhood. A conservative would find it hard to win supervisor of the Castro, for instance, but a western neighborhood could find competition, he said.
Some experts are more skeptical that a Republican will win in San Francisco anytime soon. If anything, Trump’s victory on a national level could make it harder since anyone running will be seen as an extension of his controversial political views, said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University.
“Anybody who runs as a Republican here, as an actual Republican, they will see them as an avatar of the MAGA Republicans, and that’s deeply unpopular in San Francisco,” McDaniel said.
If Trump had lost and there was a reset to a more “old-school” Republican, there could be more of a movement to the right of center, but it’s more likely moderate Democrats would have adopted some of the same positions, McDaniel said. He attributes the shift in the city to a mix of Trump growing his base, backlash to Israel’s war on Gaza, and San Francisco’s anti-establishment culture.
“Even though people think of SF as liberal and blue, there’s a lot of anti-system” sentiment, he said. “The mainstream Democratic party is not as popular.”
(Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, donated $1.45 million in support of Breed’s reelection campaign.)
--With assistance from Eliyahu Kamisher.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.