Who are these ‘politicians who would’ve nipped this tragedy, years in the making, in the bud.’?
This isn’t meant to be a trick question. I simply haven’t seen any obvious choices.
This isn’t meant to be a trick question. I simply haven’t seen any obvious choices.
My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.
I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.
There were two Republicans, and the one that got more votes (both first preference and total, since it was an IRV not first-past-the-post election) of the two wasn’t a “he”. (The one that got fewer votes was the one endorsed by most local Republican institutions.)
But if you are thinking of her 2019 reelection in the regular election and not the 2018 special election…
The other candidates were (in order of most to least final votes)
Ellen Lee Zhou (R) – the leading Republican from the special election
Joel Ventresca (endorsed by Green Party, subsequently ran in the gubernatorial recall as a Democrat)
Paul Ybarra Robertson (no apparent party affiliation)
Wilma Pang (previously Peace and Freedom, but not sure if that was current in 2019)
Robert L. Jordan (a "street minister" with no apparent party affiliation)
> Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates
There were in the open seat election where Breed was first elected; there was one of each in the regular election where she was reelected.
But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly. Many individual factions within the Democratic Party are larger, in terms of electorate, than the Republican Party in SF, and the ratio in support between the Democratic and Republican parties is smaller than that between the Republican and American Independent parties and almost the same as that between the Republican and Libertarian parties.
> I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don’t remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone
That…didn’t happen. None of the major Democrats either banded together or had a platform like that. (There were some institutional cross-endorsements for Breed and Leno.)
> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.
SF is extremely unbalanced. See: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/san_franci.... Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?
It's silly to expect that national distribution of political thought to be approximated in every geographic subdivision. It has never been even approximately, the case. Structurally, the US electoral system encourages coalition building and dividing so that factions that nationally are roughly balanced form the major national parties, but there is no reason that that's even a privileged frame to decide what is “balanced”.
Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?
In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?
What data? What data could even support the idea of a threshold of acceptable deviation from the national average distribution of political thought?
Honestly, I think that while there is a problem, you have conceptualized it entirely incorrectly. The problem is not with the diversity of distribution of political thought, the problem is national political duopoly and the electoral systems that support it, among the many manifestations of which (and far from the most important) is an absence of partisan competition in jurisdictions whose political center isn't very close to the national political center.
> If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme
It's not (and I think obviously not), unless you specific for what. If you specify that, it's may be that such a discussion is possible (and even, though less likely, possible that it is meaningful and not a distraction from more important considerations for that purpose.) But I’m not optimistic.
Can we agree on any possible intersubjective standard for too extreme? If not, fine, we revert to solipsism.
If either of the data mentioned in the first paragraph is a possible metric, how many standard deviations is too many?
If not this standard/metric, will you propose another? I challenge anyone to propose a metric or set of metrics that reasonable people will entertain as a standard of measuring a cities extremes, plus a set of thresholds that reasonable people will entertain as determining too extreme/not too extreme, and then coming to the conclusion under these metrics that SF is not too extreme. In other words, any way you want to slice it, SF is too extreme, unless you refuse to “slice it”.
2. National political duopoly is problematic, but we live in a democracy. Every citizen is free to have their own positions, vote for whoever they want, and run for office if they don’t like who’s running. Your perspective is not your skin color, you can change it and update it as you participate in the real world. Citizens of SF simply cannot blame the national duopoly for their choices. It’s completely possible to foster, appreciate, and embody diversity and non-partisanship of thought. It’s possible to foster a culture of balance and diversity, which in turn could encourage the partisan competition you mention.
SF even has ranked choice voting which should weaken the duopoly’s death grip, in theory.
The national structural problems you mention are true for every city. There’s nothing in the water or Karl the Fog that uniquely prevents people in SF from doing what I mentioned above. But they don’t, that’s their choice, that’s SF culture, and that’s the problem.
The bottom line is that they're deeply out of step with the city on culture war issues they themselves whipped up. Forcing women to give birth to corpses, legalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation, opposing all pandemic mitigations, etc. Even if an individual politician doesn't support these positions,they define the brand.