Long a political minority, SF Republicans eye expansion in 2024

Great news—the San Fran GOP is going to make a choice between the evil of the Democrat Party and the “lesser” evil of the Democrat Party.  Literally, if they support Democrats for San Fran office, they are saying THEY are part of the Progressive/Socialist Party, but just a little different.

“While local Republicans acknowledge that their odds of victory in those races remain long, they’ve expressed confidence the party’s conservative message is one that San Francisco voters are eager to hear this election cycle. Meanwhile, they say, they’re hopeful that Chang and the rest of those running will succeed in spreading that message more widely.

Amid simmering voter frustration over crime, street conditions and other quality-of-life issues, GOP leaders say they see signs that many voters are shifting right and growing more open to conservative ideas.”

The San Fran GOP is right in running so many candidates—give the voters a choice.  But they have to be clear a Socialist Democrat is a Socialist Democrat, that has ruined the City and put it in a DOOM LOOP.  That has to be the message—if you like crime, drugs, illegal aliens, homeless and corruption, vote Democrat.  Want a prosperous City, Vote GOP.

Long a political minority, SF Republicans eye expansion in 2024

By Keith Menconi, SF Examiner,  8/4/24    https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/sf-republicans-aim-to-capitalize-on-perceived-drift-right/article_507c715c-50e7-11ef-b7e9-77e1e580a836.html

On a recent Saturday morning, Min Chang planted herself on a plot of sidewalk along the Embarcadero not far from the Ferry Building, and — campaign sign in hand — began flagging down passersby.

“Hi, are you voting in November?” she said. “I’m running for the school board.”

Few zipping about under a dreary sky even gave a hint they noticed Chang, a longtime executive in the private and nonprofit sectors. But those who did stop to chat seemed to immediately connect with her central campaign pitch, focused on fiscal prudence and good governance, nodding approvingly as she laid out her plan to leverage her decades of business acumen to help stabilize the troubled finances of the San Francisco Unified School District.

“I know how to fix it,” she said.

What goes unmentioned in these interactions is that Chang is running with the backing of the local Republican Party and serves on its governing board.

Her party affiliation means that Chang’s campaign is paddling very much against the political current in San Francisco, a famously liberal city that hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since the 1960s. In the decades since, GOP registration has fallen so low that The City’s registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans more than eight to one.

This November, Chang is among an unusually large contingent of Republican candidates also running for public office in San Francisco.

The group includes Yvette Corkrean, a registered nurse whose anger over the pandemic lockdowns has propelled her to become a first-time candidate running to unseat Scott Wiener from the California State Senate; Bruce Lou, a long-time campaigner against hate crimes targeting Asian Americans now making a run for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress; U.S. Army Veteran Jeremiah Boehner, who is running for District 1 supervisor on a platform that — like other local Republican candidates — emphasizes support for law enforcement, pro-business policies and clearing the streets of the unhoused and drug users; and several others. 

While local Republicans acknowledge that their odds of victory in those races remain long, they’ve expressed confidence the party’s conservative message is one that San Francisco voters are eager to hear this election cycle. Meanwhile, they say, they’re hopeful that Chang and the rest of those running will succeed in spreading that message more widely.

Amid simmering voter frustration over crime, street conditions and other quality-of-life issues, GOP leaders say they see signs that many voters are shifting right and growing more open to conservative ideas.

After struggling for decades to hold on to electoral relevance in San Francisco, the party hopes to seize — in a moment of political flux — an opportunity to build common cause with The City’s like-minded independents and moderate Democrats, and maybe, just maybe, regain a seat at the table of mainstream city politics.

But political watchers agree — in deep blue San Francisco, the challenges will be steep, to say the least.

Expanding the conversation

For her part, Chang — who describes herself as a fiscal conservative — says many voters are welcoming her platform, which emphasizes the need for “hard decisions” in the school district in order to bring costs under control.

Asked if Chang’s partisan status would affect her vote, one woman out on the Embarcadero who had just wrapped up a friendly chat with the candidate said, “Oh, she is a Republican?”

“We have to fix our schools, so I guess I’d be open to what ideas are being proposed,” said the woman, who declined to give her name but described herself as a lifelong Democrat.

These days, such interparty meetings of the mind are growing more common in San Francisco politics as conservative priorities gain traction, local GOP leaders say.

As one measure, they have tracked modest but consistent gains in Republican voter registration over the past few years. The growing Republican support is a sign, in their view, that more voters are losing confidence in the ability of Democratic leaders to address The City’s many crises.

At the same time, some of those same Democratic leaders are now embracing more right-leaning policies themselves, like the recent ballot measure that imposed drug-screening requirements on welfare recipients and another that curtailed police oversight.

“We’ve been saying what needs to be said and what the right path forward is for a long time,” said San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis. “But the Democrats had to go through this progressive era, which has destroyed The City.”

Afraid to speak out

As former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in Milwaukee days after surviving an assassination attempt last month, about 40 party faithful squeezed inside the cramped quarters of a Marina bar for an evening watch party.

The crowd cheered as Trump called on the Democratic party to stop “weaponizing the justice system.” They booed when he dropped a reference to “crazy Nancy Pelosi.”

And attendees were just as fired up about local political grievances, complaining bitterly during the event that “one-party rule” and the leadership of Mayor London Breed have failed The City.

“What has she done?” said one independent voter who declined to give her name. “Nothing”

What The City needs now most of all, many agreed, is a conservative counterbalance for San Francisco’s progressive excesses.

“I don’t think the Democratic Party would have had its progressive era here had there been a bigger, stronger Republican Party, because we would have kept them in check,” said Dennis, who served as a delegate in Milwaukee.

Outside the confines of a conservative gathering such as this one, though, many local Republicans say they have been afraid to share their views publicly. Most attendees The Examiner interviewed declined to provide their names, saying they feared blowback from friends or coworkers.

“We are at the point where, if you are Republican in San Francisco, you’re not exactly taking your life into your own hands,” Jacob Spangler said, “But you’re certainly taking your career into your own hands.”

The 23-year-old conservative, who serves as president of the College Republicans at San Francisco State University, claimed his Republican affiliation has gotten him kicked out of house parties and rejected from a fraternity’s pledge process.

Even an ex-girlfriend, he said, decided that she did not want to make their relationship publicly known.

“She said her friends and family would disown her,” he said.

Can the party rebrand?

Hoping to untangle the local Republican Party from a thicket of toxic associations — which members contend have been applied unfairly — one local conservative group is trying to reshape its image.

Briones Society co-founder and president Jay Donde said his group wants to steer the party away from a brand of politics that “embraces conspiracy-mongering and reactionism” as well as “post-liberalism,” and instead focus on core conservative values such as small government, public safety and free markets.

The effort to shift the party has opened up an ideological rift among local Republicans that has at times grown bitter. Over the past few years, the Briones Society has found itself frequently at odds with many in local Republican leadership.

In one contentious episode two years ago, The San Francisco Republican Party passed a resolution censuring the Briones Society for denouncing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, as well as the group’s pronouncement that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe to use.

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However, the Briones Society is now set to gain more sway over the local party, after a slate of aligned candidates secured a decisive majority on the local party’s governing board.

However fraught the internal politics of this realignment have been, the external politics stand to be even more daunting, given the simple fact that changing minds about the Republican Party in San Francisco will be a tall order.

“People’s understanding of the Republican Party is dominated by their perceptions of Donald Trump,” said Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University.

For many local voters, the Trump connection immediately calls to mind his controversial stands on immigration, gender, race and abortion, McDaniel said — all issues that have inflamed public opinion in San Francisco during the former president’s time as a leading figure in the party.

That’s a lot of political water under the bridge.

“These kinds of connections are decades in the making of people’s sense of identity and who they are,” McDaniel said — and, he said, the national Republican Party’s longtime demonization of San Francisco hasn’t helped its local image problem either.

And there are plenty of fresh examples. Most recently, Trump has doubled down on his claim that Vice President Kamala Harris — the Democratic presidential nominee, who is Black and Indian American — “happened to turn Black” a few years ago. Trump and his allies have also highlighted her ties to San Francisco and record as district attorney.

If the Trump factor is a sticking point for the would-be allies of local Republicans, it’s not going away anytime soon. Support for Trump continues to run deep among San Francisco Republicans, with some candidates flaunting their love for the former president as a central pillar of their campaigns.

Perhaps the most prominent of these candidates is Ellen Lee Zhou, who has run for mayor twice before. This November, she will be running again as a self-described “MAGA Republican,” running on a platform that includes promises to resist the “globalism agenda” and “Let God Arise in government to cast out darkness.”

Political influence

San Francisco Republican leaders have been closely following the party’s registration numbers.

“I monitor it every day,” Dennis said. “It’s up again!”

Currently, the party’s voting share stands at 7.6%, a full percentage point higher than it was at the time of the 2020 election. San Francisco Democrats still make up just over 63% of The City’s electorate.

{span}All the same, while the Democrats’ 8-to-1 voting advantage represents a massive lead, that figure is somewhat smaller than it was a year ago. It’s a sign that Republicans’ relative electoral influence is trending up, albeit from a low starting point.{/span}

Some observers have cast doubt on the significance of Republicans’ registration gains, pointing out that Democrats now claim a larger share of The City’s voting public as well, a trend that could suggest that the Republican uptick is simply the result of greater partisan polarization, driving voters without party preferences into one of the rival camps.

But those to the right of center can also be found in large numbers among the roughly one-third of city voters who registered with no party preference, Dennis said.

“I think that the vast majority of those NPPs listen to what we say,” he said, even if they don’t take the step of registering as Republicans themselves.

In the San Francisco mayoral race, it appears that none of the top contenders — all of whom are Democrats — see a political upside in receiving a Republican endorsement.

All five — Breed, nonprofit executive Daniel Lurie, Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safai, and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell — suggested or stated explicitly to The Examiner that they are not pursuing endorsements from the Republican Party.

Dennis said SF GOP likely will not make an endorsement in this year’s race.

All this seems to indicate that regardless of any partisan shifting taking place in the electorate, the political calculus for candidates when it comes to Republicans has remained largely unchanged from years past.

“It’s still one of the worst things you could be called in San Francisco politics is a Republican,” McDaniel said.

Farrell has learned as much on the campaign trail.

During a July 16 fundraiser for Farrell’s campaign, Politico reported the event’s host offered up opinions that sounded an awful lot like some of the most familiar jabs that Republicans throw at San Francisco, at one point bemoaning The City’s international reputation for “lawlessness and wokeism” and mocking its pandemic-era vaccine mandates at another.

During the event, Farrell offered no pushback, Politico reported. He later distanced himself in response to the report, and Breed pounced.

“Depending on who he’s in front of, he’s saying what he needs to say,” she told Politico. “I don’t have to go around telling people I’m a Democrat. He has to say it because people think he’s a Republican.”

In the aftermath, Farrell posted his support of Harris’ presidential run on social media.

An uphill battle

Given all these political headwinds, this year’s Republican candidates are facing a daunting uphill battle — a fact that is not lost on Chang’s supporters.

Over the course of the hour of sign-waving during Saturday morning campaigning, two such supporters joining Chang that day stole a few moments to press her on her decision to run with the Republican Party.

“Do you have to be in a party to run?” supporter Maya Altman probingly asked. “Can’t you declare as an independent?”

“Min, the point is for you to win,” said another who declined to be named.

All the more confusing for these two, Chang was a lifelong Democrat before moving to San Francisco two years ago, switching allegiances only when happenstance led her to volunteer for the SF GOP and she found camaraderie among its ranks.

“It’s family for me,” Chang explained. “They have been nothing but supportive.”

Now, her loyalty is unshakable, even as she acknowledges that her Republican affiliation will most likely cost her a number of potentially vital endorsements with left-leaning political organizations that might otherwise support her candidacy.

Answering her supporters’ doubts, Chang said, “I’m going to try. You know me. I’m persistent.”

Donde of the Briones society said he is already looking ahead to the 2026 elections and the victories that he argues could very well be within reach of Republican candidates — if the groundwork is laid now.

“San Francisco is never going to be a red city — let’s be realistic,” he said. “But it can be a much more purple city than it currently is if we can run competent, credible, appealing candidates supported by well-organized campaign infrastructure.”