The Surprisingly Formidable District 2 Voting Bloc [SFByTheNumbers]
Supervisor Mark Farrell has been in the news an awful lot these days. He’s proposed a flurry of headline grabbing legislation, including measures targeting the gendered wage gap, illegal owner-move-in evictions, traffic on Lombard Street, expanding internet access for renters, and last year’s divisive Prop Q, which aimed to clear homeless encampments.
It isn’t just your imagination. Farrell is on a legislative tear these days. He’s on track to sponsor more ordinances this year than he has in the last five.
Though to be fair, his legislative activity isn’t more prolific than that of many of his colleagues - Aaron Peskin has sponsored 15 ordinances so far this year. Nor is counting legislation the best (or only) way to measure a Supervisor. But one thing sponsoring legislation does get are headlines and the attention of voters.
There are other ways to get attention. Like attending the ribbon cutting ceremony for a school outside your district:
This kind of attention is necessary if you’re the kind of Supervisor who’s interested in running for higher office in the near future. Almost every political prognosticator in the city includes Farrell in their list of potential mayoral candidates.
Former Supervisor John Avalos, in conversation with Chronicle columnist David Talbot, said that Board President London Breed would “wipe the floor with Farrell” should they both run for mayor. Talbot went on to say that Farrell was “not regarded as the sharpest tool in the shed” and that he wouldn’t play well outside his own affluent district.
And it seems like it’s exactly that sort of reputation that Farrell aims to fix through his recent activity.
But what of his “own affluent district?” I would caution anyone dismissing Farrell’s chances to double-check their tea leaves. There are several unique factors in Farrell’s district (District 2: the Marina, Pacific Heights, Presidio, Seacliff, and Russian Hill) that, while perhaps not decisive, could give Farrell an advantage. These factors are 1) voter turnout and 2) what I’ll call voter uniformity.
Voter Turnout
While every district has about the same number of residents, those residents don’t all vote at the same rate. Supervisor Farrell’s constituents are among the likeliest to cast a ballot.
Districts 2, 5 (the Haight, Cole Valley, Western Addition), and 8 (the Castro, Noe Valley, Glenn Park) stand out above their peers. Those three districts, along with District 7 (West of Twin Peaks), account for about 45 percent of the ballots cast in the 2016 election. The disparity in voter turnout is so stark that District 8 has almost double the number of electoral voters as District 11 (Crocker-Amazon, Balboa Park, Excelsior).
Running up big leads in District 2 and District 8 is exactly how Scott Wiener beat Jane Kim in their race for State Senate.
Voter Uniformity
It is true that District 2 is pretty far from San Francisco’s political center. District 2, along with District 9 voters, are unique in that respect. These voters are much more likely to come down decisively on one side of an issue or the other.
In order to examine this phenomenon and understand its impact on elections, I selected the most divisive races from the 2016 citywide elections (State Senate, and Props D, F, H, L, M, O, Q, and R) and compared how different parts of the city felt about them. Each of these elections was settled by less than 6% - and most of them were much closer than that.
The first step is to measure how far from the citywide results each district was. This gives a sense of how close each district is to San Francisco’s political center and also gauges
how decisively a district came down on each hotly contested initiative.
For the most of these races, District 2 was the furthest away from the citywide results. District 2 voters generally feel most strongly for or against a candidate or initiative.
Taking all these results together, we get a sense of how politically uniform each district is. Because the races we’re looking at all narrowly passed or failed, we’d expect a low level of uniformity (i.e. district voters would be split similarly to the city as a whole).
On average, District 2 deviated from the citywide results by more than 10 percent. Only District 9 came anywhere close (9 percent) to District 2. All of the other districts are much more likely to hew closely to each other and the city as a whole. Districts 1 (the Richmond) and 3 (North Beach, Chinatown, FiDi) deviated very little from the citywide results.
This is important because it shows that District turnout isn’t necessarily the key to winning tight elections. District 8, which had the highest turnout overall, is less influential in citywide races because, at least on the most contentious issues, it’s more divided than District 2. As far as a winning side is concerned, if a district provides one “no” vote for every “yes” vote, the net impact is canceled out. The greater the difference between one side and the other, the more sway that district has in that election.
For example, the chart below shows the State Senate (Kim vs. Wiener) results for each district. Even though voters in District 8 turned out at higher rates, they were less determinative than District 2 because the difference between the Kim and Wiener voters was smaller.
The way to measure the combined impact of voter turnout and voter uniformity is to take those same hotly contested races, and add all the differences by district.
Believe it or not, that very unexciting bar graph is basically the key to the local 2016 elections. Of the nine races we measured, District 2 voters contributed about 85,000 votes to the side that won their district. That’s more than 5 times the number of votes than that of District 10.
What Does This Mean?
District 2 voters get what they want more often than not. They turn out at pretty high rates and consistently vote with a high degree of uniformity. As a result, District 2 has a very big impact on local elections results. This is true despite the fact that District 2 is quite far from San Francisco’s political center.
District 2 was the only district that was never on the losing side of these close races. Even if you look beyond the nine closest races to every contest on the ballot in 2016, District 2 was only on the wrong side of two (Props W and X). In these two instances, the props passed citywide pretty easily, but lost District 2 but only by slim margins.
Whoever wants to run for mayor needs to either win District 2 in a big way or neutralize them by winning basically everywhere else. I don’t know how popular Mark Farrell is in District 2, but if he is then he has a formidable base from which to launch a mayoral campaign. This could be especially true if the field of candidates is crowded, as many are speculating. Having the solid support of District 2 could be a good way to jump ahead in early rounds of ranked-choice voting.
District 2 is the 200 lb gorilla in local elections. Despite what former Supervisor Avalos may say, it’s District 2 voters who wipe the floor with their opponents more often than not.