Some terrible poll numbers for SF Mayor London Breed as she sits 18 months from Election Day 2024, as a new poll has her with just a 36% approval rating, while 60% disapprove of her performance.

It initially seemed odd when District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safai declared he was running for mayor earlier this month, because it doesn’t feel there’s some constituency clamoring for Ahsha Safai to be mayor, outside of maybe Safai’s family and staff. But maybe there is such a constituency! SFGate reports on a new poll showing terrible approval numbers for London Breed, where only 36% approve of the job she's doing, while 60% disapprove.  

The same poll also shows 53% feel Breed should not be reelected, while just 22% feel she should be reelected, and 25% are undecided. Even if all the undecideds broke Breed's way, that still leaves her underwater for reelection in the November 2024 race.

And while it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, those numbers are down even from Breed's last bad poll conducted by the Chronicle in September 2022. That poll showed 22% considered her performance excellent or good, 25% calling her performance poor, and 42% saying her performance was fair.

“There’s a narrative that is out there … that just says, 'Things have gone to shit,'” the poll’s pollster Adam Probolsky of Probolsky Research told SFGate. “That’s, to some degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy among voters because everybody’s telling us that everything is bad. That narrative is pervasive, and that’s part of why the mayor, the supervisors, other electeds, are not going to be held in high regard at this moment.”

We should note the poll was commissioned by the SF San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, the union for sheriff’s office employees. That group is certainly a little partisan, even if the pollster is nonpartisan. But Breed has generally given law enforcement the overtime funds they wanted, she stuck her neck out for them in the cops at Pride controversy, and she trashed Chesa Boudin to law enforcement’s liking. The pollster Probolsky did not say why the deputy sheriffs’ union commissioned the poll, though SFGate adds that “the group wanted the numbers publicly released.”

This poll is good news for Safai, and perhaps better news for any progressive thinking of challenging Breed from the left. And it does suggest that Breed’s post-shelter-in-place turn toward complaining that drugs and crime are out of control has the downside of people considering who’s in charge, and blaming Breed for those problems. Either way, this currently appears to be a prodigious fall from the days just after Biden was elected, when Breed was a trendy name being thrown around for very high-level appointments.

Related: SF Supervisor Ahsha Safai Makes It Official: He's Running For Mayor [SFist]

Image: @LondonBreed via Twitter