In the race for San Francisco mayor, Chinese voters take center stage

SAN FRANCISCO – The contenders for San Francisco mayor are perfecting the pronunciation of their names in Cantonese. They are scrambling to recruit the best Chinese-speaking volunteers, in what one campaign manager described as a bona fide “arms race.”

And they are grabbing any opportunity to meet with Chinese American voters in the city. Ding Lee, a former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, said that in the past mayoral candidates would pop by the association’s historic building in Chinatown for a photo-op and leave after 10 or 15 minutes.

“Now they almost never turn down an invitation to come, and they stay for the whole event,” Lee said with a chuckle. “They know that the Chinese vote is quite powerful now.”

Nationally, Asian American voters often have to fight for attention because their numbers are still considered too few in most states for campaigns to invest heavily in outreach. But in San Francisco, where people of Chinese descent comprise more than one-fifth of the population, mayoral candidates believe that Chinese voters could decide the outcome in November.

The community has become more politically energized than it has been in years, helping to drive what many say has been a moderate backswing in the famously liberal city. Chinese Americans were seen as a driver of two recall elections that shook the city in 2022, to replace progressive school board members and a liberal district attorney.

Chinese voters are also considered to be up for grabs this year. There are no leading Chinese contenders in the race, and frustration over school governance and crime in the city remains high among Asian American voters in particular. San Francisco has struggled to recover from the pandemic and continues to face issues with open-air drug dealing and property crime.

Those challenging Mayor London Breed have sensed an opening. They are reaching voters on WeChat, a popular Chinese social messaging platform. Some have recruited Chinese leaders who were instrumental in the recall elections to serve in key campaign roles this year. And they are grasping for anything that might give them an edge, even tussling over how their names appear in Chinese on the ballot and campaign signs.

Political influence in the community was once centralized in the hands of progressive organizations in Chinatown and power brokers such as Rose Pak, who played a pivotal role in numerous elections, including the successful 2011 campaign of Ed Lee, the first Asian American to be elected mayor of San Francisco. Willie Brown, a political legend in California for his long-time rule over the State Assembly before he became San Francisco mayor, once said that Pak could deliver votes from 20% to 30% of the electorate.

But Pak passed away in 2016. And over the years, the Chinese community, the oldest in the nation, has grown more diverse and dispersed. As a result, candidates must work even harder to court leaders and voters in various neighborhoods.

“It’s like a 50-state strategy,” said Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who announced his candidacy for mayor in April. “You’ve got to do everything.”

Breed, Peskin and Ahsha Safaí, another leading mayoral contender who also serves on the board of supervisors, the city’s governing body, have long-standing ties within the Chinese community. Asian American voters, including Chinese Americans, were a key part of the coalition that elected Breed in 2018. And both Peskin and Safaí represent districts with large Chinese populations.

Chinese voters are not as familiar with Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist and former city supervisor who briefly served as interim mayor after Lee died in office, and Daniel Lurie, the founder of an anti-poverty nonprofit and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Both candidates, moderates who have focused on reducing crime and drug use in the city, have turned to a newly energized crop of Chinese American activists for help.

In an unmarked office space in the Mission District one recent morning, one of those activists, Kit Lam, 48, watched as an intern, hunched over a laptop, worked to update a script for campaign volunteers to use when talking to Chinese voters.

The night before, a Chinese voter told Lam that she had never heard of Lurie. But the voter mentioned that she had heard that an heir to the Levi’s fortune was running for mayor.

“It made me think that we need to mention the Levi’s thing earlier when we talk to Chinese voters,” Lam said.

In 2021, during the pandemic, Lam was one of the leaders in the campaign to recall several members of the board of education for the San Francisco Unified School District. Parents were frustrated that board members seemed to be focused on renaming 44 schools – a decision that was later overturned – while the district was among the last in the nation to fully reopen campuses.