Can a city be too liberal for Californians? San Francisco tests limits.
Before the pandemic, before San Francisco closed its public schools for a year or more, Beth Kelly was on a political “cusp” between identifying herself as a progressive Democrat and a moderate one. Not anymore. This environmental lawyer and mother of two young children says she’s now “solidly in the moderate camp.”
That move may not sound like much of a change to people outside the Golden State. But it’s a significant shift in this famously liberal city where voters are pushing back against progressive policies that they see as ineffective.
On Tuesday, Ms. Kelly and other angry voters overwhelmingly recalled three members of the San Francisco school board. During a historical pandemic shutdown, the board made national headlines for its focus on renaming 44 schools, including those named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, while elementary schools were closed for 12 months and high schools for 17. In June, the city faces another test in a special election to boot District Attorney Chesa Boudin, one of a new cadre of progressive prosecutors across America. In December, the city’s mayor, London Breed, declared a state of emergency in the downtown Tenderloin district, vowing to end “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city.”
Could it be that San Francisco, where Republicans are only 6.7% of registered voters, has found the limits of liberal idealism?
From her home in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District, Ms. Kelly describes “a shift rightward,” or at least “still left, but maybe less left” than before the pandemic. “People are getting fed up with ineffective policies, and homelessness and drugs.”
Others put it slightly differently. “This is a revolution for governance,” says Siva Raj, one of the parent organizers of the school board recall. It’s not right vs. left, he explains, but a grassroots demand “for elected leaders to actually govern.”
Left or right, up or down, many San Franciscans are dismayed at the state of their beloved city, which like other urban centers in the country has seen a pandemic spike in homelessness, drug use, and homicides, not to
