The “Moderates” Who Want to Push San Francisco Right

An article for The New Republic

This article appears in full at The New Republic

The monied interests pouring unprecedented amounts of cash into San Francisco’s local elections would like you to know they are not conservative. Call them “moderate” instead, or perhaps “commonsense.” “Progressives have tried their approach to governing the city and failed. Moderates are working to put it back together,” wrote Todd David, political director of the advocacy organization Abundance Network, in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Local advocacy group GrowSF, meanwhile, “[believes] in pragmatism and leaders who are willing to put outcomes ahead of soundbites, which puts us closer to the ‘Moderate’ end of the spectrum,” according to its blog. And billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, a major funder of a nonprofit called TogetherSF, has been especially vocal on the subject. “Like it or not, San Francisco has become a prize example of how we Democrats have become our own worst enemy,” he wrote in a recent New York Times guest essay—his second in two years—titled “Even Democrats like me are fed up with San Francisco.”

Groups like the Abundance Network, GrowSF, and TogetherSF, along with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, Stop Crime SF, and many others, are using big-money donations from an overlapping pool of donors to pull the city toward the center. This election, they’ve thrown their weight behind ostensibly moderate mayoral candidates, several ballot measures, and a slate of challengers for the city’s legislative body, the Board of Supervisors. The groups and their chosen candidates advocate for more police funding, a carceral approach to homelessness and drug addiction, looser regulations for real estate development, and lower taxes for the wealthy. Their goal, in the words of GrowSF board member Garry Tan: “Make San Francisco common-sense again.”

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